Year-End Log

I ngmar Bergman’s latest film, The Seventh Seal, seems tometobe among his best. This Swedish director is always an artist, even in a picture with obvious commercial overtones such as his Smiles of a Summer Night. In The Seventh Seal he has set himself a difficult task. The story is of a heavily pessimistic search for God and a meaning to life, placed in the time of the Crusades and the Black Plague. Death and evil win out, although the central character, a knight, is able, by playing chess with Death, to hold off the inevitable for a time. Bergman seems to be saying that man can win only temporary victories in life; whether those are worthwhile is left open. Strange how this strain of melancholy runs through so much of Swedish work. It is enough to make you think The Middle Way is not the way at all.

Bergman’s pictures always have a hard core of meaning. This, in spite of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, has never been John Huston’s forte. At his best his films really move; the excitement of action is always there, and the quick, sure, virile images bounce out at the audience, assaulting its senses. Huston at his worst is seen in his latest movie, The Barbarian and the Geisha. Nothing can really excuse this one: it is not enough to say that Cinemascope is completely unsuited to his fast-paced style or that the color makes the real unreal, for there is no sign that Huston has made any attempt to overcome these obstacles. The picture was filmed in Japan where you can note that the Japanese are having more and more trouble looking properly simple-minded. Sam Jaffe has the same trouble. John Wayne does not.

MB

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I ngmar Bergman’s latest film, The Seventh Seal, seems tometobe among his best. This Swedish director is always an artist, even in a picture with obvious commercial overtones such as his Smiles of a Summer Night. In The Seventh Seal he has set himself a difficult task. The story is of a heavily pessimistic search for God and a meaning to life, placed in the time of the Crusades and the Black Plague. Death and evil win out, although the central character, a knight, is able, by playing chess with Death, to hold off the inevitable for a time. Bergman seems to be saying that man can win only temporary victories in life; whether those are worthwhile is left open. Strange how this strain of melancholy runs through so much of Swedish work. It is enough to make you think The Middle Way is not the way at all.

Bergman’s pictures always have a hard core of meaning. This, in spite of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, has never been John Huston’s forte. At his best his films really move; the excitement of action is always there, and the quick, sure, virile images bounce out at the audience, assaulting its senses. Huston at his worst is seen in his latest movie, The Barbarian and the Geisha. Nothing can really excuse this one: it is not enough to say that Cinemascope is completely unsuited to his fast-paced style or that the color makes the real unreal, for there is no sign that Huston has made any attempt to overcome these obstacles. The picture was filmed in Japan where you can note that the Japanese are having more and more trouble looking properly simple-minded. Sam Jaffe has the same trouble. John Wayne does not.